Barack Obama lays out guidelines for drone strikes, pushes to close Guantanamo Bay

AN anti-war heckler repeatedly interrupted US President Barack Obama in a major speech on reframing US counter-terrorism policy, prompting him to depart from his prepared remarks.

"The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to - obviously I don't agree with much of what she said," Mr Obama said, after repeatedly asking the woman to sit down.

"She wasn't listening to me, in what I said - but these are tough issues and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong," Mr Obama said, in a speech dealing with US drone strikes and closing Guantanamo Bay.

An AFP photographer identified the protester as Medea Benjamin, leader of the Code Pink anti-war group, who frequently disrupts speeches by top US officials and congressional hearings.

In his speech, US President Barack Obama laid out new guidelines for drone strikes abroad and launched a new bid to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, seeking to rein in a "boundless" US war on terror.

In a major policy speech, Mr Obama said the United States faced a new threat from "diverse" terror franchises and the growing threat of homegrown radicals, after putting al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan on the path to defeat.

"We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us," Mr Obama warned at the National Defence University, seeking to reframe US counter-terrorism posture more than a decade after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"Neither I, nor any President can promise the total defeat of terror...what we must do- is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger," Mr Obama said.

Specifically, Mr Obama said he would lift a personal moratorium on transferring Guantanamo Bay inmates to unstable Yemen, and said he would appoint a new senior envoy to oversee transfers.

He also called on the Pentagon to designate a site on US soil to hold military tribunals for terror suspects now at Guantanamo Bay, and said Congress must work with him to close the facility, which has stained the US image abroad.

"I know the politics are hard. But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it," Mr Obama said.

"Imagine a future - ten years from now, or twenty years from now - when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not a part of our country."

The new effort to close Guantanamo, to try to honour a promise that Mr Obama broke in his first White House term, comes as 103 of the remaining 166 inmates are on a hunger strike.

In a rare public discussion of the US covert drone program, Mr Obama said that targeting terrorists with unmanned aerial vehicles was a legal, effective and just military tactic.

But he revealed he had signed a new presidential policy directive "insisting on upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability."

The guidance includes requirements that a target must pose a continuing "imminent" threat to Americans, and says lethal action can be used only if a suspect cannot feasibly be captured, and there is a legal basis for acting.

It also requires the "near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed," according to a White House fact sheet.

The rules for targeting suspects in places like Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan would follow the same criteria as those used for attacks on US citizens who have aligned themselves with foreign terror groups.

Such criteria however would still give the administration the power to launch strikes against targets seen as plotting "imminent" terror attacks against the United States - a definition leaving wide latitude for action.

On Wednesday, the administration admitted for the first time that it had killed Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011 - and that three other US citizens also died in anti-terror strikes abroad.

Awlaki's killing prompted a fierce constitutional debate over whether the president has the right to order the death of a US terror suspect without offering due process.

He may also name a new high-level official to manage the closure of the camp and could transfer CIA drone war functions to the Pentagon.

Mr Obama has blamed fierce opposition in Congress for the halting of transfers - though he imposed his own moratorium on sending inmates home to unstable Yemen.

Mr Obama's speech is an attempt to refocus an increasingly apathetic public on security issues as his administration grapples with a series of unrelated controversies stemming from the attack on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, the IRS' targeting of conservative groups and government monitoring of reporters.

His message will also be carefully analysed by an international audience that has had to adapt to what counterterror expert Peter Singer described as the administration's disjointed and often short-sighted security policies.

"He is really wresting with a broader task, which is laying out an overdue case for regularising our counterterrorism strategy itself," said Mr Singer, director of the Brookings Institution's 21st Century Security and Intelligence Centre in Washington.

"It's both a task in terms of being a communicator, and a task in term of being a decider."

In a letter Wednesday to congressional leaders, US Attorney General Eric Holder said only one of the US citizens killed in counterterror operations beyond war zones - Anwar al-Awlaki, who had ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on US soil - was specifically targeted by American forces. He said the other three Americans were not targeted in the US strikes.

The deaths of three of the four, including al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, were already known. Mr Holder's letter revealed the killing of Jude Kenan Mohammad, who was indicted by federal authorities in 2009 as part of an alleged homegrown terror plot to attack the US Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. Before he could be arrested, authorities said, Mohammad fled the country to join jihadi fighters in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

For months Congress has urged Mr Obama to release a classified Justice Department legal opinion justifying when US counterterror missions, including drone strikes, can be used to kill American citizens abroad. Several lawmakers declined immediate comment on Mr Holder's letter or Mr Obama's speech.

Human rights watchdogs, however, were not immediately appeased.

Human Rights First legal director Dixon Osburn welcomed the White House's pledge for more transparency but remained "deeply concerned that the administration appears to be institutionalising a problematic targeted killing policy without public debate on whether the rules are lawful or appropriate."

"The American public deserves to know whether the administration is complying with the law, and Congress should debate the legal and policy implications of our targeted killing operations," Mr Osburn said in a statement.

This week, the Pentagon asked Congress for more than $US450 million ($461 million) for maintaining and upgrading the Guantanamo prison.

Especially with regard to the drone strikes, Mr Singer said, "you have this irony that's played out over the last four years, where one of the greatest speakers of our era has largely remained silent about one of the signature aspects of his presidency."

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